On June 30, the GKO, or State Defense Committee, was created to coordinate Soviet war efforts.3 It consisted of only five people: Stalin (chairman), Molotov (deputy chairman), Voroshilov, Malenkov, and Beria.4 This group, for all intents and purposes, replaced the Politburo during World War II and made all crucial defense-related decisions. Each GKO member was responsible for a particular group of industries or army supplies.
Additionally, the Stavka (Supreme High Command) was formed to coordinate the military planning of the Red Army, the Navy Commissariat, the NKVD border and interior troops, and the partisan movement.5 It was chaired by NKO Commissar Timoshenko, later Stalin, and included Chief of the General Staff Zhukov, Molotov, marshals Voroshilov and Budennyi, and Navy Commissar Kuznetsov; there was also a board of advisers.6 Formally, all military campaigns designed by the General Staff were approved by the Stavka. However, until mid-1942, Stalin actually made all military decisions alone.
On July 3, Stalin opened a radio address to the nation with the words: ‘Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and Sisters!’7 This was the first time he had ever used the expression ‘brothers and sisters’. As a contemporary wrote, Stalin ‘may have been ill because he talked indistinctly and frequently drank water. It was terrifying to hear his hand trembling and the decanter hitting the edge of the glass’.8
Immediately after the German attack, martial law was declared in the country.9 Military tribunals were charged with hearing not only cases of servicemen, but also of civilians, if they involved threats to the defense of the Soviet Union or state security. Cases were prosecuted within twenty-four hours after the perpetrator was charged. Initially, tribunals were obliged to get Moscow’s approval for every death sentence, but on June 27, 1941, this requirement was abolished. By September 1941, commanders and political commissars of divisions were also given the right to confer the death sentence.10 Executions were carried out immediately.
The security services also reacted quickly to the German attack. On June 28, Abakumov, Merkulov, and Bochkov, representing the NKVD, NKGB, and the chief Prosecutor’s Office, signed a top-secret joint order putting the NKGB (civilian cases) and the two military counterintelligence directorates and the NKVD 3rd department (military cases) in charge of investigating traitors (Article 58-1) who went over to the German side and civilians who crossed the border in the hope of escaping the Soviet Union.11 The three military counterintelligence organizations were also responsible for arresting and investigating the family members of these traitors (chsiry) under Article 19-58-1a (intention of committing an act of treason). The cases were heard by military tribunals or the OSO.
Boris Yefimov, a political caricaturist for Pravda and Izvestia, recalled the summer of 1941 in his memoirs: ‘Of course, Stalin did not think that the drastically worsening situation at the fronts was a result of his own mistakes and errors. His own infallible wisdom and categorical opinion were axiomatic. Only others could make mistakes.’12 The hunt for scapegoats had begun.
The Meretskov Case
On June 24, 1941, only two days after the German attack, the 3rd NKO Directorate arrested deputy defense Commissar Army General Kirill Meretskov. This arrest seems particularly bizarre because Meretskov had been appointed commander of the Northern Front and military adviser to the Stavka only three days earlier, but it makes more sense if you consider a story told by Vasilii Novobranets, at the time a member of the Razvedupr or RU (Intelligence Directorate) of the General Staff. According to Novobranets, in January 1941 Meretskov ‘was demoted to deputy NKO Commissar after telling Stalin that Germany was preparing for war and the Soviet Union should urgently begin defense preparations’.13 If this is true, the arrest was Stalin’s revenge for Meretskov’s accurate prediction.
Meretskov was accused of being a member of the alleged Rychagov air force plot, probably because he had also fought in the Spanish Civil War under the alias ‘Volunteer Petrovich’. Lev Schwartzman, deputy head of the NKGB Investigation Unit, testified in 1955 that investigators ‘beat [Meretskov] with rubber truncheons. Before Meretskov’s arrest, testimonies were extracted from forty witnesses attesting to his participation in a military plot… I had orders from the highest level, and one could not violate such orders’.14 Apparently even after Stalin’s death Schwartzman was afraid to name him as the one who had ordered the beatings.
Another former investigator added that Meretskov ‘confessed’ to ‘participating in a spy group and preparing a military coup against Stalin’.15 As yet another investigator recalled, Colonel General Aleksandr Loktionov, arrested just before the war, was mercilessly beaten in front of Meretskov, but refused to cooperate: ‘Loktionov was… covered with blood, and Meretskov could not stand seeing him because he had testified against [Loktionov]. Loktionov… roared in pain, rolled on the floor, but refused to sign [a confession].’ Merkulov also participated in beatings, which, astonishingly, he did not consider torture: ‘During interrogations, with or without my involvement, interrogators punched the faces of Meretskov and [Boris] Vannikov [Armaments Commissar, arrested on June 7, 1941] and beat their backs and buttocks with rubber truncheons, but these beatings did not turn into torture. I also beat up Meretskov and Vannikov, as well as the other arrestees, but did not torture them.’16
In September 1941, Stalin suddenly ordered the release of Meretskov, Vannikov, two of his deputies, and several subordinates who had been arrested before the war.17 However, many others arrested in connection with the Rychagov and Vannikov cases were soon executed (Appendix I, see http://www.smershbook.com). In Lefortovo Prison, Meretskov was given a new military uniform and immediately brought to Stalin’s office in the Kremlin, where Stalin cynically asked him about his health (after three months of torture!).18 Then he ordered Meretskov to catch up with the Seventh Independent Army, his new command.
Stalin offered the following apology to Vannikov: ‘We made a mistake… Some scoundrels slandered you!’19 Vannikov, appointed deputy Armaments Commissar and later Munitions Commissar, was a ruthless manager who liked to tell his subordinates: ‘Once when I was the Munitions Commissar, my chief engineer changed a [technical] decision on his own to a more economical one. I ordered that he be shot.’20 And then, to illustrate his point, he would take a gun from his pocket and put it in front of him.
In Stalin’s circle, Vannikov was considered ‘an outstanding organizer of the armament industry, a good friend, an easy and responsive man’, as well as a mischievous joker.21 Even if Vannikov thought of his trick with the handgun as a joke, his subordinates took the threat seriously.
General Dmitrii Pavlov
Colonel General Dmitrii Pavlov had the misfortune of commanding the embattled Western Front while Meretskov was in prison. On July 4, 1941, Pavlov was arrested by an NKVD special group and brought to Moscow. Two days later Lev Mekhlis, the Politburo-appointed member of the Military Council of Pavlov’s front and, in fact, Stalin’s representative, cabled Stalin that Pavlov’s six closest subordinates, all generals, should also be arrested. Stalin agreed.22 Mekhlis also reported that an additional number of low-level commanders had already been arrested and detained. Stalin was so impressed by Mekhlis’s activity that on July 10 the GKO appointed Mekhlis deputy NKO Commissar.